Pulse: 49 killed, and the acquittal that followed
Forty-nine people died at an Orlando gay club in 2016; the only person tried over the massacre, the gunman's widow, was acquitted.
On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen walked into Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, during Latin night and opened fire. He killed 49 people and wounded dozens more. He was 29. After an hours-long standoff, a police tactical team breached the building and killed him. During the attack, Mateen pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group in calls to authorities.
Pulse was the deadliest attack on LGBTQ+ people in the United States. Most of the dead were young. Many were Latino, killed on a night the club had set aside to celebrate Latin music and culture.
Mateen died at the scene, which meant there would be no trial of the gunman. The only criminal trial connected to the massacre was of his wife.
Noor Salman, Mateen's widow, was arrested in January 2017. Federal prosecutors charged her with aiding and abetting her husband's attempt to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, and with obstruction of justice. She faced the possibility of life in prison.
The government's case rested heavily on statements Salman gave to the FBI after the shooting. Prosecutors argued she knew what Mateen was planning and helped him. Her defense argued the statements were unreliable, that she was a battered and intellectually limited woman pressured into saying what agents wanted to hear, and that Mateen had chosen Pulse essentially at random.
In late March 2018, after a trial in federal court in Orlando, a jury acquitted Salman of both charges. She was found not guilty and released.
The verdict came with an unusual coda. The jury foreman issued a statement saying jurors were convinced Salman knew of her husband's general intentions, but that the law and the evidence did not support a conviction on the specific charges the government brought. Reporting around the trial also noted that the FBI had no recording of the lengthy interrogation that produced Salman's incriminating statements.
What is established is fixed and terrible. Mateen killed 49 people at Pulse and was killed by police. No one stood trial for the murders themselves, because the man who committed them was dead. The single prosecution arising from the attack ended in acquittal.
That leaves a particular kind of justice gap. Forty-nine families buried someone. The legal system, presented with the only living person it chose to charge, returned a verdict of not guilty. The result means the deadliest anti-LGBTQ+ attack in the country's history produced no criminal conviction at all.